Geek TV (6)
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Feb 12, 2006
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I'm a big fan of geeky TV shows. Whenever I look through the various garbage that's regularly on TV, I usually stop at things like Modern Marvels, Engineering Disasters, MythBusters, and CSI. My dad used to watch "learning" shows on the Discovery Channel and History Channel, and I used to hate it. But now I'm totally into learning shows. It might have something to do with studying engineering in college, but it might not, seeing that many people who study engineering don't have much interest in it after college (i.e. Wendy, Kripa).
I have a slight problem with the commercials on the Discovery Channel. I've noticed that they show the same 3 commercials during every commercial break. And the weird part is that 2 of the 3 commercials are for other shows on the Discovery Channel, so I'm assuming no money is being made or exchanged in the process. I'm not sure how that works, but as long as there are new episodes of MythBusters, I'm ok with it.
Some people may argue that CSI isn't really a geek show. I could agree with that. But I think I watch it from a geek perspective. I like seeing the cool tools they use to solve crimes and the lab techniques they use to test out their hypotheses. A recent addition to my geeky crime-solving shows is Numb3rs, which is probably the geekiest show on TV. It's interesting to see the math and physics they use to solve crimes. But I'm always a little skeptical of certain magic tricks that seem to give all the answers with little to no effort. One of the things that always sticks out to me is when people are viewing camera footage and they say, "Enhance that part". This is a myth; it doesn't actually work that way. Sure, cameras can zoom in, but cameras generally don't record things in extreme detail. That would take too much power and digital storage space. And digital zoom doesn't make things clearer; it makes a tiny blob into a bigger blob (you can't get more information from the same amount of pixels). But hey, it's TV. If they keep showing it, I'll probably keep watching it. #entertainment
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Comments:
2006-02-13 09:38:00
Carl and I are big fans of Numb3rs as well. We were commenting on what big geeks we were the other night while watching it.
2006-02-13 15:00:59
It sure is geeky, but it's pretty accurate. A few weeks ago, they mentioned this thing called Benford's Law, which is a mathematical phenomenon that states that the number "1" has a 30% chance of occurring as the leading digit in lists of numbers. This wouldn't have stuck out to me normally, but I happened to read about it on several websites during the week. Weird.
2006-02-13 19:51:28
When enhancing security video (which is usually terrible because it's low res on tapes that have been erased like a million times), there actually is a way to get more detail than is captured in an individual frame. Say it's a security video in a parking deck, and you want to know the licence number of a car that drives by, but the resolution is too low to read the plate. Say it drives by the camera pretty fast, so you only get like 5 frames that show the plate, and it's not clear enough in any of them. That's ok, because you can use software to line up reference points on the car in each frame, and interpolate the pixels with each other to beef up the resolution. The theory is that the parts that are blurred in one frame might be clearer in another, and if you add them all up, you'll get something a little better. My understanding is that it's pretty hit-or-miss, whether you get something spectacular like in the movies, or just a higher resolution blur, but the idea is pretty cool.
2006-02-14 08:36:33
There is some computer commercial...great advertising by the way since I don't know what product this commercial was for..with a group of 4-5 people, one of the guys says, "I think the difference between nerds and geeks are that geeks get it done and nerds don't. And we're geeks."
So, it's not so bad being a geek - we get things done : )
2008-06-24 12:10:35
Nobody cared to explain where Dorks fit in.
2008-07-02 13:59:25
Allow me to point you here: Nerd, geek, dork
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